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I like to fly.
Somehow, through the distance of the years and the dissonance of picking up the pieces of a broken life, I forgot.
Fear brought me to flying. Curiously, it turned out that flying was one of the few pursuits perfectly suited to my limited skill set.

A discovery that was a long time coming.
Flying wasn’t something I considered then discarded as not possible for someone like me. No, I’m the possibilities girl—I never see limitations until they jerk me up short… which, in an airplane could be rather dramatic.
Quite simply, flying never hit my radar of possibilities. At least not, until, after a long stint as a single parent, I married a former Navy pilot. I spent the first summer of our marriage in the front seat of an open-cockpit bi-plane breathing exhaust and being scared and exhilarated at the same time. But, in a brief moment of clarity, as we floated up and down the east coast, it dawned on me somewhere over New Jersey that, if my husband had a major medical emergency, odds were I would, too—since I hadn’t a clue how anything in the airplane worked.

So, I get back from what seemed like several decades on the road shilling my latest tome, and the first thing I have to do is go pick up a young woman (a friend of a friend who I met on a plane–my life is like that, okay?) and take her to dinner. At least I think it was dinner–my stomach along with my brain and other important body parts were stuck in a time zone other than the one I found the rest of me in. I don’t recommend that–things can get awkward.

I hop in my car (which probably wasn’t wise) and motored off in the approximately the right direction. A few minutes later, I find myself stopped at a red light and I glance around. A sign catches my eye. In big, bold red letters it announces a contest that is going on at a certain drinking establishment in town–there are MANY.

We’re a nation of self-improvers, always looking for a better way to do something, or how to do more in less time, or how to do several things at once. We have multiple gadgets to help keep us organized—day planners, desk calendars, smart phones, and to-do lists for every aspect of our lives. Yet record numbers of Americans are stressed out, in therapy, and taking medications to deal with anxiety. We all feel overwhelmed at different times, and it impacts the people around us—our family, our coworkers, even strangers in the cars on the roads with us. As we go through our busy days of working, running errands, perhaps being a taxi for others, and trying to work in a social life, there is one simple thing we can do that will improve our wellbeing, lower our stress, and build better relationships with other people on this earth:

You might naturally think that’s because of my role as a father, but it’s really my role as a son (who is also a father). My dad died on July 3 2010, at the age of 80, having lived a hell of a life.

This will be my third Father’s Day without my dad. I miss him not just on Father’s Day, but every day. Being his son wasn’t always easy and there were some years of emotional estrangement, but we found our way back to each other as adults, before it was too late. My last words to him were, “I love you, Dad,” and his to me were, “I love you, Son.” I sat beside him and held his hand as he exhaled his final breath.

I’m so grateful to have had a father worth missing. Some of my childhood friends had fathers not worth missing. I was one of the very lucky ones.

It’s difficult to write a blog knowing that so many people are suffering right now in Oklahoma.

The devastation left by the mile-wide tornado isn’t going to disappear in the next day or week. It takes months to clear the debris, to rebuild homes, to repairs roads and utilities and businesses. Everything can be replaced, except people. It’s those left behind that I ache for. I can not imagine — I do not want to imagine — what people who have lost more than their home or business are feeling.

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Bio:

Allison Brennan

Allison Brennan is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly three dozen romantic thrillers and mysteries, including the Lucy Kincaid series and the Max Revere series. She lives in Northern California with her husband, five children, and assorted pets.